Two days ago I tried to introduce a friend to the crypto world. I showed him how to set up metamask and then went on to show him how an application on ethereum would work. This didn't work well. To be honest, it just didn't work. I tried to show him etherdelta, so he can buy and sell all the ethereum tokens but after 20 minutes my transaction to deposit ether in the etherdelta smart contract was not confirmed.
My prediction is that this slow network is part of the bubble that everyone is talking about. Valueing an unusable network this high will cause problems down the line.
I know that ethereum maximalists will tell me all about raiden network and plasma.
- Raiden: To use a raiden channel you would have to put ether in a state channel and close it afterwards. Following my earlier stated experience this would take me up to 40 minutes. I think I don't want to do that.
- Plasma: I heard a talk by Joseph Poon about Plasma. They way I understood Plasma was that the ethereum blockchain would be the main judiciary and an endless amount of child blockchains would only call the main judiciary to settle disputs. I think this is a good idea but who gets to decide when a child blockchain can use the main ethereum blockchain and for what causes. I don't think there is any mechanism that prevents me from publishing a game on the ethereum main chain that would use its scarce resources and slow down the whole network.
We need a solution for scaling and to this time I only see Steem and Bitshares doing enough transactions regularly to assume that these systems can scale further but these two blockchains cannot give developers the tools to build all the awesome applications that everyone fantasizes about. The only thing that makes sense to me is learning everything that I can about EOS right now.